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With the first frosts of fall, my garden turns from a lovely shade of green to a dirty brown with withered sticks and leaves. While my first inclination is to clean up everything, there may be seeds that you can collect or even save for the birds.

One of my late season observations was that my hummingbird feeders were attracting painted lady butterflies and bees. Since the hummingbirds were gone, I took off the top of one of my feeders and put in some plastic landing pads.

As you can see above, butterflies and bees are both attracted to this feeder. I am still using the 1 to 4 ratio of sugar to water. The bees will drink the liquid within an hour.

As you can see in the video below, it does get rather busy, but the bees paid no attention to me and were not aggressive at all.

The topic of disinfecting Monarch eggs was brought up recently in one of the blogs I follow. This is the process of dipping the eggs in a bleach and water solution for a short period of time to get rid of the OE parasite which some Monarchs have. To test for this disease you would need a microscope.

I asked Monarch Watch about this and here is their answer below. The short answer is that they don’t do this normally.

As you can see from the video, they are raising what appears to be thousands of monarch caterpillars. They are probably bleaching the eggs to avoid an OE outbreak. We only bleach eggs if we know that there is a potential for an OE outbreak from a particular monarch female and we need the eggs. All of our monarch adults are tested for OE prior to egg-laying, so we never have outbreaks.